This Almanac Calendar is dedicated to grandma's two darling granddaughters. Of course, this dedication will be extended to all my grandchildren - hopefully there will be more - who arrive in the future.

Since I 'm spending my retirement years far away from my sons, daughter-in-law, neice, and nephews and their children, I don't have much opportunity to chat with them about my opinions and experiences.

These pages are meant to fill some of that gap. I hope that my family, friends, and readers of the Almanac Calendar will learn a bit more about my personal perspective, find interesting reading material, and, perhaps, adopt some of the suggestions posted on these pages.

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Grandma Susan’s Almanac Calendaris an informal monthly journal that encourages homemakers to do more things for themselves - crafts, handiwork, “from-scratch” cooking, gardening, and other domestic arts. Grandma's mottois: "Let's work together to improve our lives by simple living, self-reliance, maintaining our religious faith, and sharing the blessings of life with others."

This Almanac Calendar is the result of two year's work on a blog, called:

Grandma's blog is a guide that women (or home makers of both genders) can follow in order to save money, as well as live "greener" and more spiritual lives.

The point of view of Grandma's blog, as well as this Almanac Calendar, comes from the understanding that right-thinking and self reliance -- have in the past and continue

today to -- save more human lives than all the governments, armies, police, and medical services in the world.

The mission of the blog is to challenge all of us (Grandma, included) to make careful decisions about the things that we really need and enhance those aspects of our lives that bring us joy, and at the same time, rid our lives of those things that don't help us. Of course, among the things we really need are our strong faith in God, and good relationships with family and friends.

INTRODUCTION

As I find myself quite a bit older, by years, than I feel, I've decided to use some of my energy to share my thoughts about being penny-wise --and not pound foolish -- in this time of economic recession. The Almanac Calendar, and the blog that preceeded it, are also about finding the time in our busy lives for activities that are intrinsically rewarding and life-enhancing. The focus of these pages is domestic, referring primarily to what goes on in the home, but it also involves, by logical extension, to how each of us relates to our community, our nation and our world.

I've written these pages primarily for my female family members and friends -- almost all of us consider ourselves house-wives or homemakers. In the interest of gender fairness, men, if they like, are also welcome here, whether or not they consider themselves "house-husbands" or home makers.

There are a number of reasons that I want to communicate to others in this space. Principally, I am motivated to do it because we, as a generation of grandmothers, mothers, and grown-up daughters, have forgotten our real heritage. In the age of mass media and along the way, most of us have lost touch with who we are. We have defined ourselves by what the news, the TV networks and the popular magazines say we are or what we should be.

Somehow, we have lost the chain of information and the motivation that comes from contact with the older generations. Our grandmothers and great grandmothers -- many of them born and raised on farms -- knew a lot about self-reliance. They were able to make do without large incomes. At that time, the majority of families lived on very modest means. They not only survived, but also had great lives and more than adequate life-styles, according to their expectations.

(In the spirit of fairness, our grandfathers and great grandfathers also knew valuable things, too, some of which need to be researched and revisited, but I leave that to others of the male gender who are, undoubtedly, more capable than I am of doing that.)

My mission is to promote ways that we homemakers can do more things for ourselves - crafts, handiwork, gardening, "from-scratch" cooking, and other almost lost domestic arts. We don't have to depend on what we can buy - let's hasten the end of unrestrained consumerism and rejoice in our own possibilities to create valuable things for ourselves and share some of this bounty with others.

At the same time, we can use less non-renewable energy by harnessing our own energy. We can be more planet-friendly as we consume less electricity and travel fewer miles in gas-based vehicles each year in the future. Being "greener" in our personal and family space is not an easy task, but it is possible. If we have a real concern for where we've gotten to in the drunken, global-warming spree that has characterized the past fifty or more years, we need to act fast. Individual choices and acts count in these difficult times.

Beyond that, and in as much as the current recession has put economic limits on most of us, we can use this time for consideration on how we live, love, work and spend money. There isn't any aspect of personal life that can't be improved by careful reflection and appropriate action. The choices are ours to make, and we should never lose sight of this fact in times like these.